Gestures

This cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture offers new explorations of how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practice from the 1960s onwards. Gestures: A Body of Work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to gesture that bridges visual art, literature and performance. Combining creative and critical modes, it is the first feminist examination of gesture—as sign, attempt, desire—through art and writing. It collects articles, essays, and dialogues exploring how gesture/s and feminism/s animate one another in feminist and interdisciplinary practice.Structured around specific ‘gestural’ stances, the book offers capacious understandings of what a gesture is and can do. It presents interdisciplinary and transnational readings of artists and writers from the 1960s onwards, including Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman, as well as less-recognised figures: artist-writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Portuguese visual poet Ana Hatherley, the Italian art collective Le Nemesiache and Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. It also features experiments in art writing and autotheory that animate the ways the body acts through, or is acted upon by, gestures such as the ‘cut’ of khatna in female genital cutting or the ‘scratch’ incurred by the skin disease eczema. While gestures may fail or falter, this book argues that they hold potential for imagining worlds beyond heterosexist, patriarchal, ableist, racist and imperialist spaces of biopolitical control. Gestures: A body of work is a cross-disciplinary collection of feminist approaches to ‘gesture’ that considers the term’s complex registers across embodied, aesthetic and political scenes. Attending to gestural movements, languages, feelings and communications, the book argues that gestures can unsettle gendered, sexed and racialised relations, norms and affects. Contributors activate the lens of gesture to offer innovative readings of art and literary works from the 1960s onwards and in transnational contexts. Experiments in art writing and autotheory reflect on the entanglement of the body, gesture and feminist practice. The book proposes that gesture be rethought as a mode of feminist practice that includes art, writing, performance and theory. Mixing disciplines, forms, genres and voices, these contributions and the book’s gestural structure offer a bold intervention into the conventions of critical writing.